TGN Focus – YouTubers Learning From the Best #1 – Susan Wojcicki

You know that I continuously make the comparison between entrepreneurship and running a YouTube channel, so I figured it might be valuable to take a look at some of the world’s best and brightest minds behind the most identifiable businesses in tech. This isn’t just a look at the biographies of rich CEOs, no this is all about learning from what they do to separate themselves from the crowd, and how they’ve grown their businesses so we can apply it to our own businesses. How do we stand out against other channels on YouTube? How do we grow our subscriber bases and foster views for our videos?

Today’s subject: Susan Wojcicki – CEO of YouTube.

Just Who is She?

Many of you may not have heard of Susan, which is cool, but you might take this as an opportunity to do some reading about her. As YouTube’s current CEO, she’s pretty important to what we do on the platform, and she’s “the brains” behind how we earn money through our channels.

“She essentially had one of the biggest hands in turning the world’s biggest search engine into one of the web’s biggest money-makers.”

What’s She Known For?

Besides being in charge of Google’s advertiser strategies for about a decade, Susan’s garage was the place where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started up their search giant (Google) when it was first incorporated. She essentially had one of the biggest hands in turning the world’s biggest search engine into one of the web’s biggest money-makers. That’s a pretty big deal.

“It’s that kind of creative thinking that we

can apply for our own purposes.”

What Can We Learn From Her?

As YouTubers, despite a fairly common goal to entertain and do what we love, many of us also look to our channels as a big form of revenue. Susan’s got that latter mentality under wraps, to the point where she evolved a new revenue model where there wasn’t one before – Google’s advertising model. It’s that kind of creative thinking that we can apply for our own purposes.

This is what I mean by an entrepreneurial mindset behind your YouTube channel – thinking of it not only as a hobby or as a means to entertain, but also as a means to sustain yourself and your way of life. YouTube itself even states that there are already thousands of content creators making more than six-figures per year on their platform, and who says that’s out of your reach? It takes hard work, the right mindset, and the right amount of creativity to really get it off the ground – just like Google and YouTube themselves.

Be your own YouTube. One of their mottos is to “do cool things that matter”, and that’s a pretty good way to get noticed in the world of online video. What’s your ‘cool’ thing? How will you separate yourself? How will you shake up online video entertainment for the better? Your answer might just be something big.